A Song for Issy Bradley (41 page)

“But Mum’s an adult.”

“You know exactly what I mean, Alma.”

“She can go out whenever she wants.”

“I didn’t say she can’t, it’s just that she’s—”

He steps into the house, primed to ask what on earth they’re doing, why they’re home from school, when he notices Alma’s swollen, bloody lip.

“What’s happened?”

“I was in a scrap with some lads at the field.”

“Are you—did they hurt you anywhere else?”

Alma nods and lifts his trouser leg to reveal a purple knot on his calf; he untucks his shirt and turns round and Ian can see the beginnings of a bruise on his lower back, shaped like the toe of a sneaker.

“They got my thigh too, but I’d better keep my trousers on.”

“Yes, you’d better.” Ian lifts his arms but they fall back to his sides. He has forgotten how to touch Alma. He tries again and as he raises his arms and reaches out, he can almost see the dividing line he has drawn between touching and not touching, between approval and acceptance. “Come here, you,” he says.

Alma edges closer and ducks, ever so slightly, enough to demonstrate reluctance but not enough to escape the embrace. Ian wraps him up. He’s all angles and bones, sharp and spiky, awkward, irreverent, and
his
.

Alma pulls away, red-faced and tongue-tied, and Ian turns his attention to Zipporah. “And why aren’t you at school?”

“Everyone’s here, Dad!” Jacob says. “I prayed for it this morning and now everyone’s—”

“Mum’s not here.”

Zipporah’s words don’t make any sense. Ian waits for her to continue, and when she doesn’t, he hurries up the stairs in an effort to understand.

“She’s not there,” Zipporah shouts after him. “We’ve looked.”

He pushes Issy’s door open. The bed is empty. He looks around. There’s nowhere else an adult could hide, but he searches anyway: in the wardrobe, under the bunks.

He steps out onto the landing. “Claire, where are you?”

“She’s not here, Dad.” Zipporah follows him up the stairs. “We’ve looked everywhere.”

“Claire!” He dashes from room to room, he won’t believe until he has seen it with his own eyes. He even checks the garden, Zipporah tagging along all the while.

Back in the kitchen, he finally concedes the point. Claire has gone. But she’ll be back. Maybe she needed some fresh air; she’s probably walking around the park as they speak. It’s just a matter
of waiting until she comes back. Perhaps she feels better and her disappearance is, in fact, a good sign.

“Her wellies aren’t here, Dad.”

“She’s probably gone to the beach, then. Let’s try not to worry,” he says as he opens the top cupboard, finds the antacid medicine, and swigs it straight from the bottle.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

He fills a glass with water and knocks it back to get rid of the taste.

“I had a look for her nightie because I wondered, after the other night with President Carmichael and Brother Stevens, whether she would think to get changed.”

He puts the glass down on the countertop, slowly, and watches the remaining water sway, then settle. “And?”

“I can’t find it …”

He looks up. Zipporah is chewing her lip.

“I think … I think she’s still wearing it.”

The telephone breaks the hiatus and Jacob runs to answer it. “It’s for you, Dad,” he says.

Ian thinks it’s Claire, which makes no sense because she doesn’t have a mobile, but he thinks it anyway and that makes it particularly disappointing—no, infuriating—when he puts the phone to his ear.

“Oh, Bishop Bradley, it’s an answer to prayer that you’re home—I tried your mobile but you’re not good at answering it during the day, are you? I hate to be a nuisance but Brother Anderson wants to come home and he’s just not well enough, his blood count’s—”

“I’m sorry.”

“—a bit low and I don’t think he—”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, Bishop—and I don’t think he—”

“No, I’m sorry because I’m busy.” His voice trembles; he’s setting
a terrible example as the children look on. “I can’t come, I’m not a doctor. Brother Anderson needs to listen to his doctors. I have to go now, goodbye.” He ends the call and puts the phone down on the counter.

Zipporah and Alma don’t move but Jacob takes his hand. “Don’t worry. Even Jesus got cross sometimes. Shall we go and look for Mum now? I haven’t been to the beach for
ages
.”

He glances at the phone and then at the children. “Yes, come on. We’ll all go. Together.”

A
S SOON AS
they get in the car, Dad says, “Let’s have a prayer.”

Zippy, Jacob, and Dad bow their heads and close their eyes. Dad speaks quietly and humbly. He says
“thank you”
for his many blessings. He says
“please.”
Please this, please that, just as he must have done when Issy was dying.

Al stares at Dad in the rearview mirror. His forehead is creased and he looks like he’s on his best behavior—like the little dog in the park: arms folded, eyes squeezed shut, hoping for a reward, convinced if he’s good one more time, he might actually win something. And although it’s tempting to make fun of him, Al closes his eyes and pulls the same face, just in case.

D
AD DRIVES PAST
the park, toward the coastal road. Jacob looks out the window for Mum. Her wellies are pink, so she will be easy to spot. Dad doesn’t slow down when he turns onto the Bumpy Road and it feels as if the car might take off as it gallops over the bumps.

“Faster, Dad, faster!” Jacob calls.

No one is walking along the Bumpy Road, there’s just the marsh and the birds. At the end of the Bumpy Road, Dad turns right and pulls into the parking lot, where there are a few other cars and some cocklers’ vans. Jacob can see a couple of dog walkers on the path that cuts through the marshy bit of the beach. He thinks he can just about see a pencil line of sea, but he can’t see Mum.

Dad pulls the handbrake up and stares through the windshield. “Where is she?” he says, tugging off his tie and unfastening his top button.

After the marshy bit ends, the beach stretches on and on. Jacob tries to spy Mum. He has spent all these weeks praying for huge, difficult things. Finding Mum shouldn’t be difficult; she’s bigger than the apostle’s rabbit and much more important.

Dad drops his tie in Zippy’s lap and scrambles out of the car, but he doesn’t head down the path to the sea; instead, he jogs in the opposite direction and crosses the road.

“He’s going the wrong way!”

“No, look, he’s just asking that man …” Alma points. Dad talks to a bird-watcher. They wait as he borrows the man’s binoculars and scans the horizon. Dad gives the binoculars back and sprints over the road. He runs through the parking lot and past the warning sign at the start of the path; he isn’t running in the embarrassed, careful way grown-ups usually run, he’s running properly, palms flat, arms slicing. Past the cocklers’ vans and the dog walkers, down the incline to the track that runs through the marshy grass.

“I can’t see her,” Zippy says.

“Shall we—” Alma begins.

Zippy and Alma open their doors and step out of the car. “You can run fast, can’t you, Jacob?” Zippy asks.

He nods and follows.

“Ready, then?”

“Yes,” he says. “Mum’s good, isn’t she?” Zippy and Alma agree that she is.

“I know something about being good,” he says. “If you’re good and you get lost, someone you love comes and finds you.”

The sea licks its way along cuts and grooves in the sand, trickling into oozing cricks that curl behind Claire and slink toward the shore. She mustn’t look back in case like Lot’s wife she betrays her hesitation.

Earlier, it seemed possible that life might continue where her dream left off, that He may appear and make a concession, offer an accord: a kind word, a glimpse of Issy—Claire isn’t fussy, she’ll accept crumbs. But now she is beginning to doubt whether He will come, and if He doesn’t and there is only sand and sea and the bare curve of the horizon, if that is all there is, perhaps she’ll find a path to Issy anyway.

As she walks, her breath beats with the pulse of the waves. A flock of starlings swoops overhead as she refastens her coat and inhales the sea smells: oil, rot, seaweed. And she waits.

It’s cold and she’s terribly tired but she fixes her eyes on the horizon, countering the chatter of her teeth with the murmured words of a hymn:
“Jesus lover of my soul, Let me to thy bosom fly, While the nearer waters roll, While the tempest still is high.”
Her tongue is thick, her mouth drained and sticky.

She waits, plastering the cracks in her conviction with hope; she
hopes
He will come—it’s nearly the same as believing, isn’t it?

Standing here, she could almost believe the world is flat and it doesn’t seem at all unreasonable to think if she just stepped into the water and swam far enough, she might fall off its edge and into heaven.

The sea seeps over furrows and swells into puddles: rolling, rushing—He isn’t coming. The realization has crept up on her like the tide. Of course He isn’t coming. No one is coming.

She readies herself. Turning will betray a longing for something other than Issy—sleep, bed, home, the children, Ian—she can’t say, and the possibility of other wants surfacing feels like a betrayal. The
wind sifts salt over her; she tastes it on her lips and feels it crusting her cheeks.

She turns.

While she was waiting the water has swept along rifts in the sand and arced around her. She is stranded on a boggy island, surrounded by dark, charging sea: not deep yet, only knee height, certainly no more than thigh height. As the tide unfolds, her island will shrink and sink and she will have to make a choice. There is only one set of footprints and they are her own. No one has walked beside her. No one has carried her.

She can’t see the coastal road or the parking lot, but she is aware of the sweep of the beach and the distance she must cover before she reaches safety. And when she turns to check the incoming tide she sees how she still might drift out of this world and into the next.

A large bird, a heron perhaps, swoops overhead, its wings spread like a cloak. She follows its movements as it tracks back, plunges, and lands beside her on backward-facing legs. She keeps as still as she can, lets her hair whip across her face, and clenches her pocketed hands in an effort to control her shivers. The bird looks old and wise, like something out of one of the fairy tales she used to read to the children. The wind ruffles its spiky blue-gray feathers and its long neck unfurls like a question mark. It has no brows to vary its expression or soften the scrutiny of its searching stare; it’s only a bird, but it’s looking at her intently, as if it has caught the wave of her thoughts.

The bird lowers its head and its long beak points at the sand while its yellow eyes continue to hold hers. It seems like the dip of its neck is an expression of sympathy. Maybe it is also a mother, and, for the first time in weeks, she experiences the feeling of being observed, attended, and appreciated.

The bird’s presence is the sort of faith-bolstering detail Ian would gratefully note, a Tender Mercy, and she wonders whether the Lord, too busy to offer reassurance in person, has sent this messenger in his stead. She tries to ask, but her voice scrapes her parched throat,
and when the dry crackle sounds, the bird takes a couple of running steps on its impossible legs, spreads its wings, and soars away, skimming the water as it ascends. If she wasn’t so exhausted, perhaps she could also fly.

Tiredness presses on her shoulders and knees. It’s becoming hard to hold her body upright. Her hands are numb, and when she looks at them, the skin is almost transparent, which isn’t surprising because she has been disappearing for some time. Her thoughts are lagging and it feels as if she may be dissolving, breaking into a scatter of notions and impressions. Her eyelids shutter and she knocks back yawns, thirsty for sleep … so many stories about sleep: Once upon a time there was a princess who slept for a hundred years; once, five foolish virgins napped while the bridegroom tarried; once there was a little girl who was not dead, but sleeping.

The island is shrinking and it’s as if her body, expecting to be vacated, is switching out the lights before she leaves. She isn’t cold anymore and the sea sounds far away. She closes her eyes and experiences the airy weightlessness she associates with fasting, the heady retreat to the summit of her body, and for a moment her arms span, her fingers quill, and she can see herself as if from above, stranded on an island in the mud flats, surrounded by gray water—head bowed, nightie flapping like a flag. She scans the horizon, dredging the line where the sky skims the water, and there is nothing but the spare spread of the sea and bare heaven.

Soaring on an updraft, she spirals and looks back at the shore. On the other side of the swirling water, a man in a white shirt and dark trousers runs at the tide, three smaller figures arrow after him: A hurtling boy is followed by a young woman towing a scampering child.

She wheels back to consciousness, assailed by the stinging wind and whirling sea. She has been so very lost; she has watched and prayed and waited. And while she has waited, her family has come.